The Pirate Bay: Here to Stay?

Ann Harrison
03.13.06

Last month, the Motion Picture Association of America announced one of its boldest sorties yet against online piracy: a barrage of seven federal lawsuits against some of the highest-profile BitTorrent sites, Usenet hosts and peer-to-peer services. Among the targets: isoHunt, TorrentSpy and eDonkey.

But, as always, one prominent site is missing from the movie industry's
announcement
(.pdf), and it happens to be the simplest and best-known source of traded movies -- along with pirated video games, music, software, audio books, television broadcasts and nearly any other form of media imaginable. The site is called The Pirate Bay, and it's operated by a crew of intrepid Swedes who revel in tormenting the content industries.

"All of us who run the TPB are against the copyright laws and want them to change," said "Brokep," a Pirate Bay operator. "We see it as our duty to spread culture and media. Technology is just a means to doing that."

A quick look at The Pirate Bay's lineup suggests which side is winning the piracy wars. Among the site's most popular downloads are recent Oscar nominees and winners like
Closer
and Brokeback Mountain, Steven Spielberg's
Munich, the latest Harry Potter film and even stinkers like
Underworld: Evolution
and The Pink Panther.
Downloading doesn't require users to register or install spyware -- if one has a BitTorrent client installed, anything listed is just a click away.

To international observers, The Pirate Bay's defiant immunity from copyright lawyers is somewhat baffling. But in Sweden, the site is more than just an electronic speak-easy: It's the flagship of a national file-sharing movement that's generating an intense national debate, and has even spawned a pro-piracy political party making a credible bid for seats in the Swedish parliament.

Founded in 2003 by a loosely knit crew of file-sharing advocates called
Piratbyrån, or Pirate Bureau, The Pirate Bay began life as a Swedish-language site occupying a second tier among popular torrent trackers. Then the MPAA's groundbreaking 2004 crackdown on torrent hubs changed everything. As famous sites like SuprNova and LokiTorrent went under, their users crowded onto the surviving hubs like pelicans on a reef. When the storm passed, The Pirate Bay remained.

According to "Anakata," one of the site's operators, subsequent MPAA lawsuits have continued to drive more users to The Pirate Bay, which today boasts 1 million unique visitors a day. The Pirate Bay's legal adviser, law student Mikael Viborg, said the site receives 1,000 to 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of its four servers.

That's bad news for the content industries, which have fired off letter after menacing letter to the site, only to see their threats
posted
on The Pirate Bay, together with mocking replies. Viborg said that no one has successfully indicted The Pirate Bay or sued its operators in Swedish courts. Attorneys for DreamWorks and Warner Bros., two companies among those that have issued take-down demands to the site, did not return calls for comment.

Viborg credits The Pirate Bay's seeming immunity to the basic structure of the BitTorrent protocol. The site's Stockholm-based servers provide only torrent files, which by themselves contain no copyright data -- merely pointers to sources of the content. That makes The Pirate Bay's activities perfectly legal under Swedish statutory and case law, Viborg claims. "Until the law is changed so that it is clear that the trackers are illegal, or until the Swedish Supreme Court rules that current Swedish copyright law actually outlaws trackers, we'll continue our activities. Relentlessly," wrote Viborg in an e-mail.

MPAA spokeswoman Kori Bernards insists The Pirate Bay violates copyright laws around the world. "Copyright laws are being enforced and upheld in countries all over the world and when you facilitate the illegal file swapping of millions of people around the world, you are subject to those laws," said Bernards. "The torrent and torrent tracker is something that points people to various files that make up a copyright that is protected under the law."

That legal claim is untested in the United States, according to Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In Sweden, the legality of the trackers is a topic of considered debate.